← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Edward Jenner22 decades - 2
Samuel Hahnemann20 decades - 3
Franz Mesmer9 decades - 4
Luigi Galvani22 decades - 5
Benjamin Rush22 decades - 6
Erasmus Darwin22 decades - 7
Alessandro Cagliostro22 decades - 8
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin0 decades - 9
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach11 decades - 10
Charles-Henri Sanson1 decades - 11
James Parkinson17 decades - 12
Philippe Pinel11 decades - 13
John Hunter22 decades - 14
Julien Offray de La Mettrie2 decades - 15
Dorothea Christiane Erxleben1 decades - 16
James Lind9 decades - 17
Josiah Bartlett19 decades
- 18
Claude Louis Berthollet1 decades - 19
Franz Joseph Gall2 decades - 20
William Cullen22 decades - 21
Joseph Warren22 decades - 22
Gerard van Swieten9 decades - 23
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers0 decades - 24
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland12 decades - 25
John Arbuthnot19 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.